Baudolino entered the nave of the basilica, cool, silent, and empty. The altars and the side chapels had already been demolished. Some dogs had arrived from God knows where to find this welcoming place, and had made it their inn, pissing at the base of the columns. Beside the main altar a cow roamed, moaning. She was a handsome animal, and Baudolino was led to ponder the hatred that drove the destroyers of the city to overlook such appetizing booty in their haste to level the city.
In a side chapel, beside a stone sarcophagus, he saw an old priest emitting sobs of despair, or, rather, chirps like a wounded animal; his face was whiter than the white of his eyes, and his wasted body twitched at every lament. Baudolino tried to help, offering him the flask of water he was carrying. “Thank you, good Christian,” the old man said, “but now I can only wait for death.”
“They won’t kill you,” Baudolino said to him. “The siege is over, the peace has been signed. Those men outside want only to knock down your church, not take your life.”
“And what will my life be without my church? This is heaven’s just punishment, because in my ambition, many years ago, I wanted my church to be the most famous and most beautiful of all, and I committed a sin.” What sin could that poor old man have committed? Baudolino asked him.
“Years ago an Oriental traveler suggested I buy from him the most splendid relics of Christianity, the uncorrupted bodies of the three Magi.” “The Magi? All three of them? Intact?”
“Three, Magi, and intact. They seem alive; that is, I mean they seem barely dead. I knew it couldn’t be true, because the Magi are spoken of in only one Gospel, the Gospel of Matthew, and he says very little about them. He doesn’t say how many there were, where they came from, whether they were kings or wise men…. He says only that they reached Jerusalem following a star. No Christian knows what their origin was or where they returned to.
Who could have found their grave? For this reason I never dared tell the Milanese I was concealing this treasure. I was afraid that, out of greed, they would seize the opportunity to attract the faithful from all Italy, gaining money from a false relic….”
“Therefore you didn’t sin.”
“I sinned because I kept them hidden in this consecrated place. I kept waiting for a sign from heaven, and it did not come. Now I don’t want these vandals to find them. They might divide up the treasure to confer an extraordinary dignity on some of the very cities that today are destroying us. Please, get rid of every trace of my past weakness. Seek help, come before evening and take away these dubious relics. With little effort you can surely win Paradise, and to me that seems no small thing.”
“You see, Master Niketas, I remembered then that Otto had spoken to me about the Magi in connection with Prester John. To be sure, if that poor old priest had displayed them as if they had appeared from nowhere, nobody would have believed him. But does a relic, to be true, have to date back to the saint or to the event of which it was part?”
“No, of course not. Many relics that are preserved here in Constantinople are of very suspect origin, but the worshiper who kisses them perceives supernatural aromas wafting from them. It is faith that makes them true, not they who make faith true.”
“Precisely. I also thought that a relic is valid if it finds its proper place in a true story. Outside the story of Prester John, those Magi could have been the trick of some rug merchant; within the true story of John they became genuine testimony. A door is not a door if it does not have a building around it; otherwise it would be only a hole—no, what am I saying?—not even a hole, because a void without something surrounding it is not a void.
I understood then that I had the story in which the Magi could have a meaning. I thought that if I said something about Prester John to the emperor to lure him to the Orient, having the confirmation of the Magi, who surely came from the Orient, would support my argument. These poor three kings were asleep in their sarcophagus, letting the Pavesi and the Lodigiani
tear to pieces the city that unwittingly housed them. They owed it nothing, they were only there in transit, as at an inn, waiting to go elsewhere; after all, they were rovers by nature hadn’t they set out from God knows where to follow a star? It was up to me to give those three bodies a new Bethlehem.”
Baudolino knew that a good relic could change the fate of a city, cause it to become the destination of uninterrupted pilgrimage, transform a simple church into a shrine. Who might be interested in the Magi? Rainald came to mind: he had been given the archbishopric of Cologne, but he had still to go there for his official consecration. To enter one’s own cathedral with the three Magi would be a great deed. Was Rainald looking for symbols of imperial power? Here he had, within reach, not one but three kings, who had also been priests.
He asked the old man if he could see the bodies. The priest required Baudolino’s help, because they had to shift the lid of the sarcophagus until they had uncovered the box in which the bodies were kept.
It was hard work, but it was worth it. O wonder! The bodies of the three kings seemed still alive, even though the skin had dried and become like parchment. But it had not darkened, as happens with mummified bodies.
Two of the Magi had faces almost milky, one with a great white beard down to his chest, the beard still intact even if stiffened, like spun sugar; the second was beardless. The third was the color of ebony, not because of the passing of time, but because he must have had dark skin while still alive: he seemed a wooden statue, and even had a kind of crack in his left cheek.
He had a short beard and a pair of fleshy lips, bared to reveal only two teeth, feral and white. All three were staring, their great, dazed eyes wide, the pupils glistening like glass.
They were enfolded in cloaks, one white, one green, and one purple, and from the cloaks trousers emerged, in barbarian style, but of pure damask embroidered with rows of pearls.
Baudolino quickly returned to the imperial encampment, and rushed to speak with Rainald. The chancellor realized at once the value of Baudolino’s discovery, and said: “It must all be done in secret, and quickly. We can’t carry away the box; it would be too noticeable. If someone else here were to be aware of what you have found, he wouldn’t hesitate to steal it from us, to take it to his own city. I’ll have three coffins made, of plain wood, and during the night we’ll carry them outside the walls, saying they contain the bodies of three dear friends fallen in the siege. There will be just you, the Poet, and a servant of mine.
Then we’ll leave them where we put them, without haste. Before I can take them to Cologne, authentic documentation will have to be produced, regarding the origin of the relics and of the Magi themselves. Tomorrow you will return to Paris, where you know learned people, and you will find out whatever you can about their story.”
During the night the three kings were carried to a crypt in the church of San Giorgio, outside the walls. Rainald wanted to see them, and he then exploded in a series of imprecations unworthy of an archbishop: “With these breeches? And this cap that looks a jester’s!”
“Lord Rainald, apparently this is how they dressed then, the wise men of the Orient. Years ago I was in Ravenna and I saw a mosaic where on the robe of the empress Theodora the three Magi are depicted more or less like this.”
“Exactly. Things that can convince the Greeklings of Byzantium. But can you imagine me presenting myself in Cologne with the Magi dressed like buffoons? We must change their clothes.”
“How?” the Poet asked.
“How? I’ve allowed you to eat and drink like a feudal lord for writing two or three verses a year, and you don’t know how to dress those who first adored Our Lord Jesus Christ? Dress them the way people imagine they were dressed, like bishops, like a pope, an archimandrite. Do it!”
“The cathedral and the bishopric have been sacked. Maybe we can recover some holy vestments. I’ll try,” the Poet said.
It was a terrible night. The vestments were found, and also something resembling three tiaras, but the problem was to strip the three mummies. While the faces seemed still alive, the bodies except the hands, totally desiccated were reduced to a framework of withes and straw, which came apart at every attempt to remove the clothing. “No matter,” Rainald said, “once the box is in Cologne, nobody will open it. Put some sticks inside, anything that will keep them straight, the
